Saturday, October 08, 2016

Watching Republican Party Leadership Trying To Cut And Run...

New York (CNN) Donald Trump on Saturday vowed to "never" drop out of the presidential race as a growing chorus of Republicans urged him to do exactly that after sexually aggressive remarks he made in 2005 surfaced a day earlier...

It's weird. When Trump got rolling, I thought he would destroy the GOP, but not this quickly. I thought this would be a more normal election because Trump would keep off Twitter and say more normal things he was told to by his campaign director. Then he'd lose by 4% like Romney and the GOP would go back to being the Anti-Hillary party. Instead Trump's losing by more than 6% and none of the polling yet even reflects this latest fiasco. So, it's certain to get worse before it gets any better. How much further does he have to fall, how many suburban GOP women have to stay home before its a 10% blowout and the House falls, because that's about the gerrymander level cushion they have - 10%. At 10% they start losing a LOT of House seats.

Other sites have stated that GOP operatives have whispered there is worse to come. Two more shoes to drop, if I'm reading the info right. Oh yeah, and the debate on Sunday may well be something to behold. I expect stellar ratings for real time viewership, and then the whole thing will have Columbus Day to percolate before the high judgement is given. I'd say there could be a good fall in polls if the debate and shoe dropping create more reactions along the line of this bit of film. Fecal matter, meet turboprop; turboprop, fecal matter.

After the 2010 Census, the Republican Party put in motion its plan to redraw congressional districts more favorable to conservative candidates. Whereas bipartisan gerrymandering creates safe districts for both parties, the GOP undertook partisan gerrymandering, which packs the other party’s voters into as few districts as possible and spreads out the gerrymandering party’s voters across many districts, each of which that party can win but often by uncomfortably narrow margins.

Pennsylvania illustrates this strategy. In the 2012 election, Democratic congressional candidates won about 75,000 more votes than did Republican candidates, but the GOP captured 13 of 18 seats. Four of the five Democratic districts had been packed with Democratic voters. The safest of these districts scored D+38 on the Cook Report’s Partisan Voter Index (PVI), which means that voters in this district backed President Obama in 2008-2012 by 38 percentage points more than the national electorate.

By contrast, the GOP currently holds four marginal districts, rated as R+2, R+1, or Even. Another six GOP districts are R+5 or R+6. The remaining three are R+9 or higher.

The Pennsylvania pattern holds up nationally, where the GOP holds numerous marginal districts. The chart below shows PVI ratings for all of the GOP’s House seats. Republicans hold 37 districts rated R+2 or lower and 18 at R+3 or R+4, for a total of 55 marginal districts. Democrats, by contrast, hold half as many.

"Gregory saw [that h]is best chance was to make a softened and ambiguous speech, such as would leave on the detective's mind the impression that the anarchist brotherhood was a very mild affair after all. [...] Syme had once thought that anarchists, under all their bravado, were only playing the fool. Could he not now, in the hour of peril, make Syme think so again?"-- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: a nightmare (1908), p.32 of the 1986 Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics reprint)

Yup. Same dynamic in Ohio. In 2012 more Democratic votes were cast overall but the GOP won the Ohio House and Senate. A bill to have an independent commission draw legislative boundaries passed overwhelmingly and takes effect in the next few years.